Sunday, January 8, 2012

pneumocephalic and pneumocephalon

What do I mean when I use the word pneumocephalic? 

I made it up years back because I put pneumo (i.e., Air; gas) and cephalic (i.e. related to the brain) to represent this other concept called "air head."  An adjective it is.

Only to know later that there is a health condition called Pneumocephalus where there is presence of air or gas in patient's cranial cavity.  

Since pneumocephalus is a proper medical term and people do suffer from it, I did not have the audacity to use the word pneumocephalus when converting my "pneumocephalic" to a noun.  Instead, I chose to use the word pneumocephalon.




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